Motherhood

Once upon a time, you read Cheaper by the Dozen and you thought you'd like to have a dozen kids. How different that would be from your childhood, much of which was spent alone. Everyone would always have a playmate. It would be insta-party, all the time.

Then you had one child.

And a second.

But you didn't make it to a third, or a fourth, let alone a twelfth.

Two are party enough.

It's hard to remember the Before, the sans children, the time when you could sit on a sofa and read a book if you wanted to. Or you could go out if you wanted to. You could have whatever you wanted for supper, and not have to accommodate a picky palate. There were few tears, and no fights, and the quiet was immense.

But so was the emptiness.

Motherhood is such a complicated thing. It should be as easy as delivery: take a deep breath and push. But delivery is painful--not easy--and the pain doesn't stop once a child is born. The pain continues, though it moves upward from belly and bottom to head and heart.

You love and you ache and you hope and you plead. And your expectations of what motherhood "should" be are never met, but what you have is somehow better than what you expected, even if it's not perfect.

Especially if it's not perfect.

You look at your infant and his smooth soft cheeks, his tufts of hair, the curve of his lip.

You see your toddler, with his graham-cracker-dusted hands and his will and his want. You're toppled by his exuberance.

You send your baby off to kindergarten, and he seems so big...and yet so little.

You watch your school-age boy master Legos and multiplication tables and bikes.

Before you know it, you send him off to a social. A dance.

The days are long, and the years are quick.

What could bring more joy?

And yet, what could bring more sorrow?

You know you should savor each day, and you try to, but the days really are long and sometimes you just want to be alone. There are big personalities in these children of yours, and they clash frequently. They have great gifts, but great gifts come with great challenges. It takes everything inside of you to calm and to quiet and to teach. Somedays, it takes more than what you have to give.

Tonight, you ache to be by yourself. You love, yes, you love, but sometimes you need to remember who you are and who you were and how it feels to breath all by yourself and what you looked like as a little girl, back when you thought a dozen children was a good idea.

And so you hide away, squirreled in a dark corner somewhere and look at pictures your mom just sent you, pictures of you as a baby, at four, at six, at eight. You hardly remember your childhood, perhaps because your mind is full of the details of Life Now. But you look and you look--backgrounds and expressions and people and clothing and furniture--and there out of the blue, you're looking at the round face of the oldest gingerbread boy. But it's not him, it's you. You cup your fingers around the long hair. Yup. It's his face. You flip to a different picture. There's the expression of the youngest gingerbread boy. They are now what you were then.

Did your own mother feel such complicated feelings about motherhood? Does motherhood still feel complicated to her now? A great big soup of love and fear and worry and exhaustion that will never go away?

You put the pictures down. Motherhood is immense and long and weighty. But it is also sweet and full and surprising.

Earthbound

Walking preserves your sanity. So you tie up your sneakers, pop in your ear buds, and around the loop you go.

Well, you think, there are better things that preserve your sanity, but walking is the cheapest. And the most accessible.

You set a good pace--enough to get your heart rate up--one foot pounding the pavement after the other. It's rained, and that means one thing during spring in New England: slugs. You watch where you step.

You stand up straight, shoulders back, moving from the hips rather than from the shoulders.

Before long the music gets to you.

The fact is, you're a dancer. You've always been a dancer. From the time you were little, doing "Red Dances" and "Blue Dances" in the living room, to the time you performed with dance companies much later.

You're a dancer.

Dancing is what preserves your sanity.

But there's no stage and your body is injured and doesn't always do the things you want it to do.

So you walk.

Walk, walk, walk, walk.

Walking is boring. And the music. Oh, the music. Your mind begins choreographing, and in your head you're spinning and twisting, arms and ribs undulating. Your feet are moving, and in your mind, you leap, no longer earthbound. Your pace slackens as your imagination takes over your movement.

A bird calls out, and you are back on a street in your neighborhood, not on a stage somewhere. A street with slugs on it, and ferns unfurling by the roadside. A river flows nearby. And your feet are walking, walking, walking.

There's no one here.

The road is before you.

The road is empty, and wide.

Just like a stage.

It's tempting. So very tempting. One of these days, you're going to do it. You're going to dance down that street like it's nobody's business, with only the trees and the ferns and the lady's slippers and the woodpeckers for audience.

But not today. Today, you're going to walk. Maybe tomorrow you'll dance.

Small Things

You are forced to arise this morning when the youngest gingerbread boy knocks on your door.

"Mmph," you say.

He takes that to mean come in, because a few seconds later, the door knob squeaks, and the door opens. If allowed to wake up on his own, the youngest gingerbread boy is painfully cheerful in the morning.

"Good morning, Mommy!" He walks around to the other side of the bed, moves the pillow, and climbs in. "I came to see you."

You crack an eye open. It's hard to be anything but happy in the face of such filial devotion.

"Is it Mother's Day tomorrow?" he asks.

"No, not yet."

He snuggles up to you. He's been asking you when Mother's Day is for weeks now. There is a large wrapped package hiding in the other gingerbread boy's room, and the waiting is almost more than he can bear.

The siren call of morning cartoons sounds, and he leaves you for some PBS. That's ok. You got a morning snuggle, a hug and a kiss, and now some quiet time for work.

Later, there'll be cleaning. There will be planting. There will be piano and cello. The soundtrack of your life has moved on from the Peanuts theme song and Moonlight Sonata to Red Balloons and the Entertainer. Once, it was Pomp and Circumstance, and every time you walked from room to room, you felt obligated to walk a slow step-touch-step-touch-step-touch.

Graduation is still far away for your gingerbread boys, though. You still have a few more years to mold their characters, to teach them what they need to survive. And in the meantime, you're grateful for the morning hugs and kisses from the younger, for the fist bumps and half-hearted hugs from the older. You're grateful for a sunny spring morning, for the trees lifting their lacy branches into the sky, for the lily-of-the-valley that's springing up at the edge of the forest. You're grateful for the breath in your lungs, and the space of a whole day awaiting your will.

Don't Forget

You go to bed certain that you are going to die.

(Of course you're going to die. Everyone is going to die.)

You know this, but it feels very close for some odd reason. Is this a premonition? Should you be scared? You think about death. You think hard about death, and come to the conclusion that you're not afraid to die, but you still have a lot of work left to do, and you pray that God won't take you until you've cleared the decks at least a little bit.

The night passes, and you don't die.

You wake up, very much alive, but unable to remember your phone number. You roll over, hear your bones settle into a new position, and concentrate on your phone number. It distresses you, this forgetting, and you think about growing old.

You think about losing your mind.

You wonder if the days will pass by unnoticed, day after day, until you are no longer young, but, in fact, very very old. You wonder if the day will come that you turn the stove on to make tea, then wander outside, forgetting that the stove is on or where exactly it is that you live. You wonder if you will forget who the Gingerbread Man is.

You wonder if you will forget who you are.

Don't forget.

Scrubbing

Sometimes you just have to scrub. Pull out the rubber gloves, the cleanser, and scrub your heart out. It feels good, this scrubbing. Too much time has passed since the last scrubbing because you've been occupied with parties, wrapping, packing, traveling, more traveling, snow, not to mention whale costumes with laser eyes.

The scrubbing got set aside for sanity's sake. But the whale costume is done, the parties are over (at least until Groundhog Day), the wrapping has been disposed of, the packing has been unpacked, the laundry done and folded, and the wanderlust has been satisfied for quite some time.

Stuff has been put away, and now it's time for scrubbing. Some muscle and some cleanser and everything shines once more. Some sweeping, some mopping, some vacuuming.

Home.

Healing

On Tuesday, the snow turned to rain, and the rain brought fog. The gingerbread boys went back to school. The youngest participated in an Ellis Island immigration simulation. The children dressed up in historical costumes, chose a name and a country, and with a lucky draw ended up in first or second class accommodations. The rest were shuttled like cattle into steerage.

The outline of a boat was taped off on the gymnasium floor. The children crowded together into the "ship," and one of the teachers read letters from passengers until they reached Ellis Island, heralded by the principal, who was dressed as Lady Liberty. After eating a snack of bananas, which is what immigrants at Ellis Island were given, they were sent to processing for medical, legal, and psychological questioning. You were assigned to be a Special Inquirer, asking the children questions such as, "Are you married? Do you have any money?"

At the end, the children performed choreography to "Coming to America," taught by the PE teacher. You stood there in costume, with other costumed parents, with such mixed emotions. Love for your gingerbread boy, gratitude for teachers, sorrow for others, pride for country, dismay for our society.

On Wednesday, you woke up not thinking about the awful thing, though it flitted through your head multiple times during the day, always accompanied by tears. You taught the eldest gingerbread boy to sew that night, in between making gingerbread cookies and cutting homemade marshmallows. He needed a costume. A whale costume. A whale costume with laser eyes. A whale costume with laser eyes AND stilts. If you can pull that one off, anything's possible. Maybe life will go on, you think.

On Thursday, you went to the temple. As you headed towards Boston, you drove past a mini-cooper with a vanity plate saying TUMNUS. Your eyes were drawn to it -- did it really say TUMNUS or are your eyes playing tricks on you?

Yes, it really said TUMNUS.

How funny. How ironic, since you've been living in Narnia the past week. The license plate reminds you that there was more to Narnia than winter. There were true friends and good people. There was Aslan.

When you reached the temple, it was quiet and calm, an atmosphere you've desperately needed in the past week. You walked from one area of the temple to another, and a woman greets you. "Merry Christmas!" she said, smiling as she opened the door for you.

You're momentarily stunned. Yes, Christmas. It's the end of December, isn't it? Christmas is next week.

You looked up at her. "Merry Christmas!" you replied.

On this solstice, winter's only starting, but the days are getting longer, and Christmas is right around the corner. Perhaps Aslan is even on the move.

Haunted

You are haunted by this enormous bad thing. Mercifully, you are given the gift of a snow day, one more day to keep the gingerbread boys home, away from wagging mouths that might take their innocence. You know you can't protect them forever, but from this, you must at least try. It is too horrific for adults to process, let alone the twelve-and-under crowd. Oh, they know something happened, but they are ignorant of the details. You pray they remain so.

You yourself have had nightmares about it; your usual nightmares never connect to reality, but spring forth the strange brainchild of a cross between a post-apocolyptic read and a snack that brings on unimaginable weirdness.

But this.

This is pain. This is grieving. This is scraping the edges of a possibility too awful to contemplate.

Even in your deep faith and knowledge of an eternal life and a loving Father in Heaven, you are stunned by this. Caught in the abyss between nightmares and sleeplessness. Caught in the web of societal pain that seemingly knows no bound.

You hug the gingerbread boys, and feel guilty when you snap at them for behaviors that should not be tolerated. You think, what if this were to happen to them? What if the thread of their fragile life were to be clipped--snip!--just like that, and you were left with the memory of your discipline, your irritation, your lack of patience towards them. The weight of your own long list of faults nearly suffocates you. You feel the burden of how you just don't meet your own expectations as a parent.

You decide to go for a walk. Some exercise will do you good. But you find yourself at the corner of the next street over, the corner where the crowded pine trees grow. Covered with snow, they look exactly like Narnia. And you find yourself thinking that it's always winter and never Christmas. Even with Christmas just eight days away, it feels like it will always be winter and never Christmas.